MochiBot Blog

That was my lame attempt at making a sensational headline. I think I’ll stick with writing code for a living.

Anyways, we received some great feedback from a user today and I wanted to share it with everyone. It’s like putting our report card on the fridge.

Click here to read

Welcome back everyone! I hope that you all had a nice break. Personally, I just sat around trying to relax and prepare for the upcoming year. I typically don’t watch TV, but I got sucked into watching Laguna Beach on MTV one day when they were having a season marathon. I think I lost about 50 IQ points that day.

MochiBot usage was pretty low over the holidays (as expected) but it looks like things are really picking back up again this week. Everyone must be busy at work again as we’re seeing a surge in SWFs being tracked and new users.

A lot of great things are going to be coming from Mochi Media this year. We just added a new member, David Fulton (aka JackSmack), to the Mochi team. He’ll be helping us with a new site that we’re launching to host the great games and animations that are tracked by MochiBot. We’re working with some amazing Flash developers and designers so we wanted to create a site to showcase the Flash that they produce.

We’ll have more news in the upcoming weeks so stay tuned.

Things are winding down around here for the holidays so I wanted to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from all of us at Mochi Media. We’re looking forward to an exciting new year with extra features, some new products, new team members, and another open source project for the community.

Best wishes!

I’ve been using Firefox for over a year now and I can’t begin to express how much happier I am compared to my days with IE. It’s not just the inherent features such as tabbed browsing, better CSS rendering, and the lack of crashes that are nice. The things that I really love are the wide array of extensions that people have built for Firefox. Maybe it’s because I like toys and the ability to tinker, but regardless, my web experience has been greatly improved by some priceless extensions. Here are just a few that I can’t live without:

• MeasureIt - This extension allows you to measure any space on a page in pixels. I use this all the time to check out our page layouts and element sizes.
• ColorZilla - This is an eye dropper tool that let’s you pick out any color on a page and copies the value straight to your clipboard. I often times see great color palettes when I’m surfing so enjoy picking up the colors that I would like to use in the future.
• Mouse Gestures - This extension allows you to execute browser commands such as back, forward, refresh, new window, etc. with a simple move of your mouse. I have commands, bookmarks, javascript commands, you name I’ve got a mouse gesture for it.
• Sage - This is one extension that I can’t live without. It’s a simple yet effective RSS reader built right into the sidebar of Firefox. The nice thing is that you can customize the look and feel of your reader or you can just use one of the many templates that they offer on the site. Aside from email this is how I keep in touch with the rest of the world.

About 38% of our visitors are on IE. I’d like to get that number down below 10%. I’m pursuing this because not only are Firefox users generally happier people (not scientifically proven), but MochiBot also works much better when playing in Firefox. With that said, if you’re not already using Firefox then please go out and get it. *Using the link below also helps feed us for another day*

As an added treat I thought this was pretty clever. Firecat

I had been meaning to post this a while ago, but totally forgot about it. The game is called Jewel Thief and was produced by Duncan Gough at 3RD Sense.

The goal of the game is to grab as many jewels as possible without getting caught. To control the game you just move your mouse around the screen grabbing jewels and avoiding either the trip laser or the detection orb. It sounds simple, but the game speeds up to a frantic pace as you gather more and more jewels. For those that are pushing for a high score you can go for bonuses with color combinations or jewel shape combinations.

This is a well executed game and a great way to procrastinate from whatever you’re busy doing. Just another gem that’s being tracked by MochiBot. hehe

Sorry for the site being so slow today. At first I thought it was just me. My brain has been a bit slow today after being out all night last night with the Hot or Not gang. It’s kind of hard having a Christmas party with just three people in our company so we were invited by the Hot or Not guys to join them at their holiday party. Many thanks to Jim and James for making us feel like family. Needless to say we ate a lot, drank a lot, ate even more and were out till about 4am.

But I digress…we’ve had a maintenance script running since 3am and it’s still going. ack! The system will be much happier once it’s finished so we appreciate your patience.

One of the most commonly requested features from our users is event tracking.  Everyone has a different goal in mind when it comes to tracking the various events that can happen within a Flash movie.  Therefore, I’ll go over some simple techniques that you can use to get better information out of MochiBot. 

You can track events within your Flash movie by simply creating a new MochiBot for each event.  Multiple MochiBots can be used in a SWF so all you have to do is place some MochiBot code on your timeline at the point where you want to track an event.  Here are some different scenarios of how this technique can be used.

Game Developers:  Game developers usually want to track what levels people reach and thus determine how hard their game is.  To begin tracking level progression with MochiBot you should create a new MochiBot for each level in your game.  It will help to organize your Dashboard if you name your MochiBots with the name of the game first and then the level after that.  For example, a game named Gopher with three levels could have the following MochiBots:

• Gopher: Level 1 (placed at the begining of Level 1)
• Gopher: Level 2 (placed at the begining of Level 2)
• Gopher: Level 3 (placed at the begining of Level 3)

Place the MochiBot code on the timeline where each level begins and you now have a level progression monitor.  

Flash Site Developers:  Web traffic monitors are great for seeing how much traffic you get to your site, but they just can’t track actions of your visitors if you have a site that’s built in Flash.  Therefore, you’ll want to use MochiBot in each of the various sections of your Flash site to see what “pages” your visitors are going to.  You may also want to track click events on a link so all you would have to do is to create a MochiBot to track that event and place the code in your button movieclip.

We’ve even seen people use MochiBot in a 1×1pixel SWF on each of the HTML pages in their site to see which pages are most popular.  We thought it was so clever that we did on our site too.  :)

Flash Videos and Cartoons:  People who publish videos or create animations in Flash need to know not only how many people are watching their work, but also how much of the work people are watching.  Do people watch the whole movie, 10 seconds of the movie or get half way through and leave?  One way you can monitor how much of your Flash movie people watch is to place some MochiBot code in different points of your timeline.  A simple and effective practice is to track every quarter of your movie.  For example, if you have a Flash video or animation that has 1000 frames, then you’ll want to put some MochiBot code at frames 250, 500, 750, and 1000.  

After reading all of this you may wonder why we just don’t build an additional event tracking system in MochiBot.  Well we’re working on it, but the biggest challenge that we have to overcome is finding a simple yet effective way to present the data so that all of the different types of people who use MochiBot can get the information they need.  It’s amazing how much little changes to the interface design can make a big difference in usability.  With that said we’re working to give you all the best possible experience while using our product.

Good luck with your Flash endeavors and we hope to hear some stories from you guys on how you’re using MochiBot.

The MochiBot team is taking a little roadtrip down to LA tomorrow for some pre-conference fun with Flash. Then on Sunday we’re heading down to Anaheim for the real deal. There’s a ton of stuff going on the next few days and our schedules are packed to the brim. I’ll either have a lot to write about or write nothing at all because of the lack of time.

If any of you are going to the MAX conference or will be in the area and want to meet up then just leave us a message here.

If you’ve ever done any game development then you know how hard it is to accomplish true shape based hit detection. Fortunately, Grant Skinner has just published a class that allows for simple shape based hit detection in Flash 8.

http://www.gskinner.com/blog/…

If you’ve got a great game to show off then feel free to post a link here.

Here’s a link to some great Flash 8 examples that also include a download for each example.

http://www.senocular.com/pub/flash/8/index.php

There are a lot of great features in Flash 8 (aside from the Flash 8 Player security model) that will really push media content to a new level in the months to come.